Are zero-rated apps a form of market segmentation?

One major advance in knowledge over the last twenty-five years of research in industrial organization is just how important — and how possible — market segmentation agreements and institutions may be.  Is this another example?:

…this summer the service provider T-Mobile began offering its customers an alternative. Under a free feature on some plans, T-Mobile users can now stream music services like Pandora, iTunes Radio, Rhapsody, and Spotify all day long without having to worry about sapping their data caches.

T-Mobile calls it “Music Freedom,” and it’s part of a quiet but powerful global trend.

Apps and Web sites that don’t count against the users’ data plan are popping up both in the United States and abroad, often under names like Wikipedia Zero or Facebook Zero. “[W]e hope that even more people will discover the mobile Internet with Facebook,” the company blogged in announcing Facebook Zero in 2010.  (The names are a riff on “zero-rated,” an economics term for products exempt from taxation.) But set against the ongoing dispute over so-called net neutrality, those apps are beginning to spark a debate about the future of an open, equal, and vibrant Internet in the United States and abroad.

And there is a trade off for consumers. In return for low-cost service, users are, in some cases, being corralled into a limited view of the Internet. Rather than wandering freely from site to site, they have gained gatekeepers who have power over what they see.

That is from Nancy Scola.

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